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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )

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Continuing my coverage of the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit at the Fairmont Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, we had a day full main-tent sessions. Here is a quick recap of the sessions presented in the morning.

Leadership and Innovation on a Smarter Planet

Todd Kirtley, IBM General Manager of the western United States, kicked off the day. He explained that we are now entering the Decade of Smart: smarter healthcare, smarter energy, smarter traffic systems, and smarter cities, to name a few. One of those smarter cities is Dubuque, Iowa, nicknamed the Masterpiece of the Mississippi river. Mayor Roy Boul of Dubuque spoke next on his testimonial on working with IBM. I have never been to Dubuque, but it looks and sounds like a fun place to visit. Here is the [press release] and a two-minute [video].

Smarter Systems for a Smarter Planet

Tom Rosamillia, IBM General Manager of the System z mainframe platform, presented on smarter systems. IBM is intentionally designing integrated systems to redefine performance and deliver the highest possible value for the least amount of resource. The five key focus areas were:

Enabling massive scale

Organizing vast amounts of data

Turning information into insight

Increasing business agility

Managing risk, security and compliance

The Future of Systems

Ambuj Goyal, IBM General Manager of Development and Manufacturing, presented the future of systems. For example, reading 10 million electricity meters monthly is only 120 million transactions per year, but reading them daily is 3.65 billion, and reading them every 15 minutes will result in over 350 billion transactions per year. What would it take to handle this? Beyond just faster speeds and feeds, beyond consolidation through virtualization and multi-core systems, beyond pre-configured fit-for-purpose appliances, there will be a new level for integrated systems. Imagine a highly dense integration with over 3000 processors per frame, over 400 Petabytes (PB) of storage, and 1.3 PB/sec bandwidth. Integrating software, servers and storage will make this big jump in value possible.

POWERing your Planet

Ross Mauri, IBM General Manager of Power Systems, presented the latest POWER7 processor server product line. The IBM POWER-based servers can run any mix of AIX, Linux and IBM i (formerly i5/OS) operating system images. Compared to the previous POWER6 generation, POWER7 are four times more energy efficient, twice the performance, at about the same price. For example, an 8-socket p780 with 64 cores (eight per socket) and 256 threads (4 threads per core) had a record-breaking 37,000 SAP users in a standard SD 2-tier benchmark, beating out 32-socket and 64-socket M9000 SPARC systems from Oracle/Sun and 8-socket Nehalem-EX Fujitsu 1800E systems. See the [SAP benchmark results] for full details. With more TPC-C performance per core, the POWER7 is 4.6 times faster than HP Itanium and 7.5 times faster than Oracle Sun T5440.

This performance can be combined with incredible scalability. IBM's PowerVM outperforms VMware by 65 percent and provides features like "Live Partition Mobility" that is similar to VMware's VMotion capability. IBM's PureScale allows DB2 to scale out across 128 POWER servers, beating out Oracle RAC clusters.

The final speaker in the morning was Greg Lotko, IBM Vice President of Information Management Warehouse solutions. Analytics are required to gain greater insight from information, and this can result in better business outcomes. The [IBM Global CFO Study 2010] shows that companies that invest in business insight consistently outperform all other enterprises, with 33 percent more revenue growth, 32 percent more return on invested (ROI) capital, and 12 times more earnings (EBITDA). Business Analytics is more than just traditional business intelligence (BI). It tries to answer three critical questions for decision makers:

What is happening?

Why is it happening?

What is likely to happen in the future?

The IBM Smart Analytics System is a pre-configured integrated system appliance that combines text analytics, data mining and OLAP cubing software on a powerful data warehouse platform. It comes in three flavors: Model 5600 is based on System x servers, Model 7600 based on POWER7 servers, and Model 9600 on System z mainframe servers.

IBM has over 6000 business analytics and optimization consultants to help clients with their deployments.

While this might appear as "Death by Powerpoint", I think the panel of presenters did a good job providing real examples to emphasize their key points.

Now that the US Recession has been declared over, companies are looking to invest in IT again. To help you plan your upcoming investments, here are some upcoming events in April.

SNW Spring 2010, April 12-15

IBM is a Platinum Plus sponsor at this [Storage Networking World event], to be held April 12-15 at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, Florida. If you are planning to go, here's what you can go look for:

IBM booth at the Solution Center featuring the DS8700 and XIV disk systems, SONAS and the Smart Business Storage Cloud (SBSC), and various Tivoli storage software

IBM kiosk at the Platinum Galleria focusing on storage solutions for SAP and Microsoft environments

I have personally worked with Mark, Neville, Vincent and Gordon, so I am sure they will do a great job in their presentations. Sadly, I won't be there myself, but fellow blogger [Rich Swain from IBM] will be at the event to blog about all the actviities there.

The webinar will include client testimonials from various companies as well.

Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit, April 27-29

I will be there, at this this 2-and-a-half-day [Executive Summit] in Scottsdale, Arizona, to talk to company executives. Discover how IBM can help you manage your ever-increasing amount of information with an end-to-end, innovative approach to building a dynamic infrastructure. You will learn all of our innovative solutions and find out how you can effectively transform your enterprise for a smarter planet.

During lunch, people were able to take a look at our solutions. Here are Dan Thompson and Brett Cooper striking a pose.

Hyper-Efficient Backup and Recovery

The afternoon was kicked off by Dr. Daniel Sabbah, IBM General Manager of Tivoli software. He started with some shocking statistics: 42 percent of small companies have experienced data loss, 32 percent have lost data forever. IBM has a solution that offers "Unified Recovery Management". This involves a combination of periodic backups, frequent snapshots, and remote mirroring.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) was introduced in 1993, and was the first backup software solution to support backup to disk storage pools. Today, TSM is now also part of Cloud Computing services, including IBM Information Protection Services. IBM announced today a new bundle called IBM Storwize Rapid Application Backup, which combines IBM Storwize V7000 midrange disk system, Tivoli FlashCopy Manager, implementation services, with a full three-year hardware and software warranty. This could be used, for example, to protect a Microsoft Exchange email system with 9000 mailboxes.

IBM also announced that its TS7600 ProtecTIER data deduplication solutions have been enhanced to support many-to-many bi-direction remote mirroring. Last year, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) reported that they were average 24x data deduplication factor in their environment using IBM ProtecTIER.

"You are out of your mind if you think you can live without tape!"
-- Dick Crosby, Director of System Administration, Estes

The new IBM TS1140 enterprise class tape drive process 2.3 TB per hour, and provides a density of 1.2 PB per square foot. The new 3599 tape media can hold 4TB of data uncompressed, which could hold up to 10TB at a 2.5x compression ratio.

The United States Golfers Association [USGA] uses IBM's backup cloud, which manages over 100PB of data from 750 locations across five continents.

Customer Testimonial - Graybar

Randy Miller, Manager of Technical System Administration at Graybar, provided the next client testimonial. Graybar is an employee-owned company focused on supply-chain management, serving as a distributor for electical, lighting, security, power and cooling equipment.

Their problem was that they had 240 different locations, and expecting local staff to handle tape backups was not working out well. They centralized their backups to their main data center. In the event that a system fails in one of their many remote locations, they can rebuild a new machine at their main data center across high-speed LAN, and then ship overnight to the remote location. The result, the remote location has a system up and running by 10:30am, faster than they would have had from local staff trying to figure out how to recover from tape. In effect, Graybar had implemented a "private cloud" for backup in the 1990s, long before the concept was "cool" or "popular".

In 2001, they had an 18TB SAP ERP application data repository. To back this up, they took it down for 1 minute per day, six days a week, and 15 minutes down on Sundays. The result was less than 99.8 percent availability. To fix this, they switched to XIV, and use Snapshots that are non-disruptive and do not impact application performance.

Over 85 percent of the servers at Graybar are virtualized.

Their next challenge is Disaster Recovery. Currently, they have two datacenters, one in St. Louis and the other in Kansas City. However, in the aftermath of Japan's earthquakes, they realize there is a nuclear power plan between their two locations, so a single incident could impact both data centers. They are working with IBM, their trusted advisors, to investigate a three-site solution.

This week, May 15-22, I am in Auckland, New Zealand teaching IBM Storage Top Gun sales class. Next week, I will be in Sydney, Australia.

Jeanine Cotter, IBM VP for Data Center Services, started out with a video about Sabre. IBM developed this revolutionary airline reservation system to handle the huge volume of transactions. Today, 18 percent of organizations consider downtime unacceptable for their tier-1 applications, and 53 percent would be seriously impacted by an outage lasting an hour or more.

Eventually, companies cross the "Continuous Availability" threshold, the point where they discover that the possibility of downtime is too costly to ignore. IBM has clients using 3-site Metro/Global Mirror that can fail-over an entire data center in just five mouse clicks.

Jeanine also mentioned Euronics, which is using SAN Volume Controller's Stretched Cluster capability, which allows them to easily vMotion virtual guest images from one data center to another. SVC has had this capability for a while, but now, with full VMcenter plug-in and VAAI support, the capability is fully integrated with VMware.

A final example was a mid-sized University, they are using IBM Storwize V7000 with Metro Mirror. The primary location's Storwize V7000 manages Solid-state drives with Easy Tier. The secondary location's Storwize V7000 has high-capacity SATA drives and FlashCopy.

Customer Testimonial - University of Rochester Medical Center

Rick Haverty, Director of IT infrastructure at University of Rochester Medical Center [URMC] provided the next client testimonial. The mission of the URMC is to use science, education and technology to improve health. URMC gets over $400 million USD in NIH grants, which puts them around 23rd largest University-based academic medical centers in the country. They have over 900 doctors, general practice and specialists.

URMC has an IBM BlueGene supercomputer, a Cisco network over 45,000 ports, and over 7.5 million square feet of Wi-Fi wireless internet coverage. They have three datacenters. The first is 7500 square feet, the second is 6000 square feet, and the third is just 800 square feet to hold their "off-site tapes".

URMC has digitized all of their records, including Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system, medical dosage history, imaging "priors", calibration of infusion pumps, RFID monitoring, and even provide IT support while the patient is on the operating table. RFID monitoring ensures all of the refrigerators are keeping medications at the right temperature. A single failed refrigerator can lose $20,000 dollars worth of medication.

When is a good time for downtime? At URMC, they handle 90,000 Emergency Room vists per year, so the answer is never. When is the ER busiest? Monday morning. (not what I expected!)

URMC's EMR software (Epic) runs on clustered POWER7 servers, with DS8700 disk systems using Metro Mirror to secondary location. They also keep a third "shadow" POWER7 for read-only purposes, and a separate system that provides web-based read-only access. Finally, they have 90 stand-alone Personal Computers (PCs) that contain information for all the patients that have reservations this week, just in case all the other systems fail.

The exploding volume of data comes from medical imaging. For radiology (X-rays), each image is called a "study" takes 20-30 MB each, and they have 650,000 studies per year. This represents about 16TB storage per year, with 3 second response time access. These must be kept for 7 years since last view, or until the patient reaches the age of 18 years old, which ever is later.

But radiology is just one discipline. Healthcare has a whole bunch of "ologies". Another is "Pathology" which looks at cells between glass slides in a microscope. Each study consumes 10-20GB, and URMC does about 100,000 pathology studies per year, representing 150TB per year.

URMC has identified that they have 42 mission-critical applications. The data for these are stored on DS8000, XIV, Storwize V7000 and DS5000, all managed behind SAN Volume Controller.

Dan Galvan, IBM VP of Marketing for Storage, was the next speaker. With 300 billion emails being sent per day, 4.6 billion cell phones in the world, and 26 million MRIs per year, there is going to be a huge demand for file-based storage. In fact, a recent study found that file-based storage will grow at 60 percent per year, compared to 15 percent growth for block-based storage.

Dan positioned IBM's Scale-out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) as the big "C:" drive for a company. SONAS offers a global namespace, a single point of management, with the ability to scale capacity and performance tailored for each environment.

The benefits of SONAS are great. We can consolidate dozens of smaller NAS filers, we can virtualize files across different storage pools, and increase overall efficiency.

Powering advanced genomic research to cure cancer

The next speaker was supposed to be Bill Pappas, Senior Enterprise Network Storage Architect, Research Informatics at [St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital]. Unfortunately, St. Jude is near the flooding of the Mississippi river, and he had to stay put. An IBM team was able to capture his thoughts on video that was shown on the big screen.

Thanks to the Human Genome project, St. Jude is able to cure people. They see 5700 patients per year, and have an impressive 70 percent cure rate. The first genetic scan took 10 years, now the technology allows a genome to be mapped in about a week. Having this genomic information is making vast strides in healthcare. It is the difference of fishing in a river, versus putting a wide net to catch all the fish in the Atlantic ocean all at once.

Recently, St. Jude migrated 250 TB of files from other NAS to an IBM SONAS solution. The SONAS can handle a mixed set of workloads, and allows internal movement of data from fast disk, to slower high-capacity disk, and then to tape. SONAS is one of the few storage systems that supports a blended disk-and-tape approach, which is ideal for the type of data captured by St. Jude.

IBM's own IT transformation

Pat Toole, IBM's CIO, presented the internal transformation of IBM's IT operations. He started in 2002 in the midst of IBM's effort to restructure its process and procedures. They identified four major data sources: employee data, client data, product data, and financial data. They put a focus to understand outcomes and set priorities.

The result? A 3-to-1 payback on CIO investments. This allowed IBM to go from server sprawl to consolidated pooling of resources with the right levels of integration. In 1997, IBM had 15,000 different applications running across 155 separate datacenters. Today, they have reduced this down to 4,500 applications and 7 datacenters. Their goal is to reduce down to 2,225 applications by 2015. Of these, only 250 are mission critical.

Pat's priorities today: server and storage virtualization, IT service management, cloud computing, and data-centered consolidation. IBM runs its corporate business on the following amount of data:

9 PB of block-based storage, SVC and XIV

1 PB of file-based storage, SONAS

15 PB of tape for backup and archive

Pat indicated that this environment is growing 25 percent per year, and that an additional 70-85 PB relates to other parts of the business.

By taking this focused approach, IBM was able to increase storage utilization from 50 to 90 percent, and to cut storage costs by 50 percent. This was done through thin provisioning, storage virtualization and pooling.

Looking forward to the future, Pat sees the following challenges: (a) that 120,000 IBM employees have smart phones and want to connect them to IBM's internal systems; (b) the increase in social media; and (c) the use of business analytics.

After the last session, people gathered in the "Hall of the Universe" for the evening reception, featuring food, drinks and live music. It was a great day. I got to meet several bloggers in person, and their feedback was that this was a very blogger-friendly event. Bloggers were given the same level of access as corporate executives and industry analysts.

Wrapping up my coverage of the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit at the Fairmont Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, we had a final morning of main-tent sessions. Here is a quick recap of the sessions presented Thursday morning. This left the afternoon for people to catch their flights or hit the links.

Data Center Actions your CFO will Love

Steve Sams, IBM Vice President of Global Site and Facilities, presented simple actions that can yield significant operational and capital cost savings. The first focus area was to extend the life of your existing data center. Some 70 percent of data centers are 10-15 years old or worse, and therefore not designed for today's computational densities. IBM did this for its Lexington data center, making changes that resulted in 8x capability without increasing footprint.

The second focus area was to rationalize the infrastructure across the organization. The process of "rationalizing" involves determining the business value of specific IT components and deciding whether the business value justifies the existing cost and complexity. It allows you to prioritize which consolidations should be done first to reduce costs and optimize value. IBM's own transformation reduced 128 CIOs down to a single CIO, and from 155 host data centers scattered were consolidated down to seven, and 80 web hosting data centers down to five. This also included consolidating 31 intranets down to a single global intranet.

The third focus area was to design your new infrastructure to be more responsive to change. IBM offers four solutions to help those looking to build or upgrade their data center:

Scalable Modular Data Center - save up to 20 percent than traditional deployments with turn-key configurations from 500 to 2500 square feet that can be deployed in as little as 8-12 weeks to an existing floorspace.

Enterprise Modular Data Center - save 40 to 50 percent with 5000 square foot standardized design for larger data centers. This modular approach provides a "pay as you grow" approach that can be more responsive to future unforeseen needs.

Portable Modular Data Center - this is the PMDC shipping container that was sitting outside in the parking lot. This can be deployed anywhere in 12-14 weeks and is ideal for dealing with disaster recoveries or situations where traditional data center floor plans cannot be built fast enough.

High Density Zone - this can help increase capacity in an existing data center without a full site retrofit.

Neil Jarvis, CIO of American Automobile Association (AAA) for Northern California, Nevada and Utah (NCNU), provided the customer testimonial. Last September, the [AAA NCNU selected IBM] to build them an energy-efficient green data center. Neil provided us an update now six months later, managing the needs of 4 million drivers.

Virtualization - Managing the World's Infrastructure

Helene Armitage, IBM General Manager of the newly formed IBM System Software product line, presented on virtualization and management. Virtualization is becoming much more than a way of meeting the demand for performance, capability, and flexibility in the data center. It helps create a smarter, more agile data center. Her presentation focused on four areas: consolidate resources, manage workloads, automate processes, and optimize the delivery of IT services.

Charlie Weston, Group Vice President of Information Technology at Winn Dixie, one of the largest food retailers in the United States, with over 500 stores and supermarkets. The grocery business is highly competitive with tight profit margins. Winn Dixie wanted to deploy business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) while managing IT equipment scattered across these 500 locations. They were able to consolidate 600 stand-alone servers into a single corporate data center. Using IBM AIX with PowerVM virtualization on BladeCenter, each JS22 blade server could manage 16 stores. These were mirrored to a nearby facility, as well as a remote disaster recovery center. They were also able to add new Linux application workloads to their existing System z9 EC mainframe. The result was to free up $5 million US dollars in capital that could be used to remodel their stores, and improve application performance 5-10 times. They were able to deploy a new customer portal on Linux for System z in days instead of months, and have reduced their disaster recovery time objective (RTO) against hurricanes from days to hours. Their next steps involves looking at desktop virtualization.

Redefining x86 Computing

Roland Hagan, IBM Vice President for IBM System x server platform, presented on how IBM is redefining the x86 computing experience. More than 50 percent of all servers are x86 based. These x86 servers are easy to acquire, enjoy a large application base, and can take advantage of readily available skilled workforce for administration. The problem is that 85 percent of x86 processing power remains idlea, energy costs are 8 times what they were 12 years ago, and management costs are now 70 percent of the IT budget.

IBM has the number one market share for scalable x86 servers. Roland covered the newly announced eX5 architecture that has been deployed in both rack-optimized models as well as IBM BladeCenter blade servers. These can offer 2x the memory capacity as competitive offerings, which is important for today's server virtualization, database and analytics workloads. This includes 40 and 80 DIMM models of blades, and 64 to 96 DIMM models of rack-optimized systems. IBM also announced eXFlash, internal Solid State Drives accessible at bus speeds.

The CIO of Acxiom provided the customer testimonial. They were able to get a 35-to-1 consolidation switching over to IBM x86 servers, resulting in huge savings.

Top ROI projects to Get Started

Mark Shearer, IBM Vice President of Growth Solutions, and formerly my fourth-line manager as the Vice President of Marketing and Communications, presented a list of projects to help clients get started. There are over 500 client references that have successfully implement Smarter Planet projects. Mark's list were grouped into five categories:

Enabling Massive Scale

Increase Business Agility

Manage Risk, Compliance and Security

Organize Vast Amounts of Information

Turn Information into Insight

The attendees were all offered a free "Infrastructure Study" to evaluate their current data center environments. A team of IBM experts will come on-site, gather data, interview key personnel and make recommendations. Alternatively, these can be done at one of IBM's many briefing centers, such as the IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona that I work at.

This wraps up the week for me. I have to pack the XIV back into the crate, and drive back to Tucson. IBM plans to host another Executive Summit in the September/October time frame on the East coast.

Continuing my coverage of the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit at the Fairmont Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, we had a day full main-tent sessions. Here is a quick recap of the sessions presented in the afternoon.

Taming the Information Explosion

Doug Balog, IBM Vice President and Disk Storage Business Line Executive, presented on the information explosion. Storage Admins are focused on managing storage growth and the related costs and complexity, proper forecasting and capacity planning, and backup administration. IBM's strategy is to help clients in the following areas:

Storage Efficiency - getting the most use out of the resources you invest

Service Delivery - ensuring that information gets to the right people at the right time

Cory Vokey, Senior Manager of IT Systems Operations at Research in Motion, Ltd., the people who bring you BlackBerry phone service, provided a client testimonial for the XIV storage system. Before the XIV, RIM suffered high storage costs and per-volume software licensing. Over the past 15 months, RIM deployed XIV as a corporate standard. With the XIV, they have had 100 percent up-time, and enjoyed 50 percent costs savings compared to their previous storage systems. They have increased capacity 300 percent, without any increase to their storage admin staff. XIV has greatly improved their procurement process, as they no longer need to "true up" their software licenses to the volume of data managed, a sore point with their previous storage vendor.

Mainframe Innovations and Integration

Tom Rosamillia, IBM General Manager of the System z mainframe platform, presented on mainframe servers. After 40 years, IBM's mainframe remains the gold standard, able to handle hundreds of workloads on a single server, facilitating immediate growth with scalability. The key values of the System z mainframe are:

Industry leading virtualization, management and qualities of service

A comprehensive portfolio for business intelligence and data warehousing

The premier platform for modernizing the enterprise

A large and growing portfolio of leading-applications ISV support

Steve Phillips, CIO of Avnet, presented the client testimonial for their use of a System z10 mainframe. Last year, Avnet was ranked Fortune's Number One "Most admired" for Technology distribution. Avnet distributes technology from 300 suppliers to over 100,000 resellers, ISVs and end users. They have modernized their system running SAP on System z with DB2 as the database management system, using Hypersockets virtual LAN inside the server to communicate between logical partitions (LPARs). The folks at Avnet especially like the ability for on-the-fly re-assignment of capacity. This is used for end-of-quarter peak processing, and to adjust between test and development workloads. They also like the various special purpose engines available:

Mike Hill, IBM Vice President of Enterprise Initiatives, presented on IBM's leadership in cloud computing. He covered three trends that are driving IT today. First, there is a consumerization and industrialization of IT interfaces. Second, a convergence of the infrastructure that is driving a new focus on standards. Third, delivering IT as a service has brought about new delivery choices. The result is cloud computing, with on-demand self-service, ubiquitous network access, location-independent resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and flexible pricing models. Government agencies and businesses in Retail, Manufacturing and Utilities are leading the charge to cloud computing.

Mike covered IBM's five cloud computing deployment models, and shared his views on which workloads might be ready for cloud, and which may not be there yet. Organizations are certainly seeing significant results: reduced labor costs, improved capital utilization, reduced provisioning cycle times, improved quality through reduced software defects, and reduced end user IT support costs.

Mitch Daniels, Director of Technology at ManTech International Corporation, presented the customer testimonial for an IBM private cloud for Development and Test. Mantech chose a private cloud as they work with US Federal agencies like Department of Defense, Homeland Security and the Intelligence community. The private cloud was built from:

IBM Cloudburst virtualized server environment

Tivoli Unified Process to document process and workflow

Tivoli Service Automation Manager to request, deliver and manage IT services

Tivoli Self-Service Portal and Service Catalog to allow developers and testers to request resources as needed

The result: Mantech saved 50 percent in labor costs, and can now provision development and test resources in minutes instead of weeks.

Make innovations real, be both an insightful visionary but also an able pragmatist

Raise the Return on Investment (ROI) of IT, determine savvy ways to create value but also be ruthless at cutting costs

Expanding the business impact of IT, be a collaborative business leader with the other C-level executives, but also be an inspiring manager for the IT staff.

In this case, IBM drinks its own champagne, using its own solutions to help run its internal operations. In 1997, IBM used over 15,000 applications, but this has been simplified down to 4500 applications today. Thousands of servers were consolidated to Linux on System z mainframes. The applications workloads were categorized as Blue, Bronze, Silver, and Gold to help prioritize the consolidation. IBM's key lessons from all this were:

Gather data at the business unit level, but build the business case from an enterprise view.

Start small and monitor progress continually, run operations concurrently with transformational projects

Address cultural and organizational changes by deploying transformation in waves

I found the client testimonials insightful. It is always good to hear that IBM's solutions work "as advertised" right out of the box.

Doug Balog, IBM VP and Business Level Executive for Storage, presented Smart Archiving. Citing research by Jon Toigo, Doug indicated that 40 percent of data on disk should be archived. Sadly, a vast majority of companies continue to use their backups as archives. There is a better way to do archives, to address the needs of four use cases:

Analytics

Compliance

Consolidation

Preservation

The IBM Information Archive for email, files and eDiscovery offers full text indexing. A well-deployed archive strategy can save up to 60 percent in backup costs, and reduce backup times by 80 percent. IBM offers advanced analytics and visualization for archive data.

An analysis of a global insurance company found that they kept, on average, 120 copies of every email sent. This was the combination of an average of 12 copies of the email, multipled by 10 backups of the email repository.

Banjercito, a bank in Mexico, has a 10-year retention requirement from government regulations.

The new LTFS Library Edition allows Library-based access to files stored on tape cartridges. The new TS3500 Library Connector means that a single system of connected tape libraries can hold up to 2.7 Exabytes (EB) of data.

Archive Industry Perspectives

Steve Duplessie from Enterprise Strategy Group [ESG] gave his views on the challenges of volume, access and cost. His definition for archive: the long term retention of information on a separate environment for compliance, eDiscovery and business reference purposes. Steve advocates a purpose-built solutiion for archive. There are three major challenges for implementing an archive solution:

Getting Participation -- Steve feels that key stakeholders have inappropriate expectations of what archive is, or can be.

Define Tasks -- Steve argues that archive is very much a process-oriented approach, and tasks must fit business process and procedures

Prepare for Future Content Types -- the frequent change of standard and proprietary data types poses a real challenge for long term retention of data

For example, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority [FINRA] oversee 4,000 brokerage firms, and 600,000 broker/dealers. They have mandated the storing of digital data related to stock trades, and this can include text messages, voice messages, and emails. They continue to expand this definition, so soon this could include tweets on Twitter, for example.

Steve feels there are four key requirements for archive:

Support for email, such as an email application plug-in

Off-line access to archived data

Support for mobile devices, such as smartphones

Basic search capabilities

Companies are starting to take archive seriously. About 35 percent of firms surveyed have adopted archive, and another 36 percent plan to in the next 12-24 months. Enterprise archive has grown over 200 percent from 2007 to 2009. Steve agrees that not everything needs to be stored on disk. Retention periods greater than six years dictates the need for tape.

Current systems may not meet today's requirements. Data loss and downtime costs have skyrocketed. Data Protection and Retention projects can represent a gold mine of savings, new capabilities can greatly lower costs, allowing companies to shift resources over to revenue generation.

Big Data, New Physics and Geospatial Super-Food

I would vote this the best session of the day! For all those confused on what the heck "Big Data" means, Jeff has the best explanation. Jeff Jonas is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the Chief Scientist of Entity Analytics. He had just finished his 17th marathon on Saturday, and his fingers were bandaged.

Jeff had founded the Systems Research and Design (SR&D) company, known for creating NORA (non-obvious relationship awareness) used by Las Vegas casinos to identify fraud. SR&D was acquired by IBM back in 2005. Jeff is focused on sensemaking of streams. He feels many companies are suffering from "Enterprise Amnesia".

"The data must find the data .. and the relevance must find the user."
-- Jeff Jonas

Jeff's metaphor to Big Data is a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the outside of the box. To demonstrate his point, he presented a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces and asked four teenagers to put the puzzle together without the advantage of the picture on the box. What he had not told them was that he mixed four different puzzles together, removing out 10 to 20 percent of the pieces from each puzzle. He also added some duplicate pieces from a second identical puzzle, and just to make things fun, included a dozen pieces from a sixth puzzle just to mess with their heads. Within a few hours, the kids had managed to figure out that there were four puzzles, that there were duplicate pieces, and that there were some pieces that did not fit any of the four puzzles.

"You can't squeeze knowledge from a pixel."
-- Jeff Jonas

This approach favors false negatives. New observations reverse out old conceptions. As the picture emerges, this provides added focus on new information. More data can provide better predictions. "Bad" data, including misspelled words and mis-coded categories, was often discarded or corrected on the basis of "Garbage-In, Garbage Out", but can now be useful in a Big Data perspective.

Take for example the 600 billion recordings of the "location data" captured on cell phones every day. With regular triangulation of cell phone towers, the information can pinpoint you within 60 meters, add GPS and this improved to within 20 meters, and add Wi-Fi is further improved to 10 meters. While this data is "de-identified" so as not to identify individual users, the process of re-identification is relatively trivial. Jeff's system is able to predict a person will be next Thursday at 5:35pm with 87 percent accuracy.

Thus, Big Data represents an asset, accumulation of context. Real-time analytics can be a competitive advantage. These streams of data will need persistent storage and massive I/O capabilities. In one example, Jeff processed 4,200 separate sources of information and was able to identify "dead votes". These are votes cast by people that died in years prior, indicating voter fraud.

Jeff's latest project, codenamed G2, will tackle not just people, but everything from proteins to asteroids.

Normally, the worst time slot is the hour after lunch, but these presentations kept people's attention.

During the break, I talked with some of the other bloggers at this event. From left to right: Stephen Foskett [Pack Rat] blog, Devang Panchigar [StorageNerve], and yours truly, Tony Pearson. (Picture courtesy of Stephen Foskett)

Meet the Experts

This next segment was a Q&A panel, with a moderator posing questions to four experts. Originally, I was scheduled to be the moderator, but this was changed to Doug Balog. The experts on the panel were:

Rich Castagna, Editorial Director for Storage Media, TechTarget. TechTarget is the group that runs the [SearchStorage] website.

Stan Zaffos, Gartner VP of Research, who spoke earlier today. I have worked with Stan for years as well, and have attended the last four Gartner Data Center Conferences held every December in Las Vegas.

Jon clarified a statement Doug Balog said earlier in the day attributed to his study. Doug had said that 40 percent of all data should be archived. The study that Jon Toigo had done found that, on average, for the data on disk systems, about 30 percent is useful data, 40 percent is not active and could be eligible for archive, and the remaining 30 percent was crap.

The other experts introduced themselves. Rich felt that "Cloud" was still the biggest buzzword in the IT industry. Stan felt that CIOs should ask their storage administrators "What are you doing to improve my agility and efficiency". Steve felt that it was better to focus on improving process and procedures, rather than trying to deploy the best technology.

What are the top issues IT leaders should be discussing with the Storage Managers?

Stan- To ensure SLAs meet but not exceed design, to automate, and to evaluate SAN/NAS ratios.
Steve- Server virtualization is putting the spotlight on storage. Failure to implement storage virtualization is becoming the gate that slows down sever virtualization adoption.
Jon- Insist on management features from all storage vendors, try to separate feature/function from the underlying hardware layer. See IBM's [Project Zero].
Rich- Efficiency, Archiving, Thin Provisioning, Compression, Data Protection & Retention, Backup Redesign to protect endpoints like laptops and cell phones.

When does Archive eliminate Backup?

The need for protection never goes away. There are two kinds of data: "originals" and "derivatives", and two kinds of disk: "failed" and "not yet failed".

Given SATA and SAS drives, what is the future of 10K/15K RPM drives?

There is no future for these faster drives, they are going away.

What is the biggest challenge for adopting archive?

It is easy to move data out of production systems, but difficult to make these archives accessible for eDiscovery and Search. There is also concern about changing data formats. Adobe has changed the format of PDF a whopping 33 times.

This was by far the most entertaining section of the day! Hand-held devices allowed the audience to vote which answers they liked best.